What's the best stretch to work the height of your sidekicks?

Question

All right...I used to study TKD, and got to the level of 1st degree black belt. Problem is, I haven't been to an official studio in about 4-5 years...I'm still in shape, but my flexibility is shot. Now, I know how to get front-direction kicks back up; stretch kicks. However, I don't know how to get things like hook kicks, round kicks, roundhouse, yadayada, higher. You martial arts guys out there...what do I do?

Answer 1

do side splits as far as you can go for at least 2 minutes at a time

Answer 2

The side and hook kicks and to a lesser extent round house kicks are the hardest to increase your height and flexiblity for.  Thats because all three of those use both a combination of your groin, and hamstring muscle group along with your lower back muscle group and the motility in your hip.  Someone suggested dynamic stretching and that is good advice.  By first isolating each of those areas that I mentioned above and stretching them before stretching them together you will build better flexiblity.  Kneel on the floor and lean forward placing your forearms on the floor and turn your feet on their sides and let your knees go out to a nintey degree angle from your body; make sure you relax your lower back while doing this and breath in through your nose, out through your mouth.  Breating like that will help to relax you and doing this stretch will isolate the groin muscle group without straining it.  Excessive stretching (when you feel like your muscles are ripping) causes less flexibility as it tears the muscle fibers excessively.  Once you have been there in that position of a minute or so begin rocking forward and back slightly and this will help with your hip joint some.  Make sure you warm up some first and I always butterfly stretch my legs first before doing this stretch.  Warm, semi-relaxed muscles stretch better than cold ones and I always stretch my lower back first and ham-string group before going to the butterfly and groin group.  

You lose your flexibility in the groin group quickly because you tend not to use those muscles in every day life so much like you use the hamstring group for walking, running, going up and down stairs, etc.  Do some reading on slow, or static type stretching and dynamic type stretching and you should see huge results in three to four weeks.  The above is just one example of it.

Answer 3

Do alot of dynamic stretching. It involves moving parts of your body while gradually increasing reach, speed of movement, or both.

I am a 3rd Kyu brown belt in shotokan karate and i am still training on getting my side kick's height perfect and hook kick on my left leg is not strong and fast like my right side.

Just keep practicing and insha'allah it will get better later on.

Answer 4

Those high kicks are generally so impractical in a self-defense context anyways, why don't you focus on effective lower kicks?  A powerful grappling fighter will catch one of your kicks, get you down on the ground and have his/her way with you.

Answer 5

The only way to improve is through intense stretching which takes time you didnt achieve your black belt overnight so you will understand

Answer 6

front and side splits, standing side on and swinging your leg to the side as height as it can(keeping your knee locked other wise its pointless), also streaching you legs a far appart as they can while sitting ont the floor and streaching down to the middle and then to each leg

leg must be straight on all of these.

i do these and i can kick above my head, kick people in the head on all of my kicks. as you are a black belt, you know that you cant only do it once you have to keep doing it over and over.

also you need to do a full stretch because you can increase the height you kick at quicker if you stretch you hips, people think the main reason for your problem is the tendets in their legs but its also the tendets in you lower back and hips, remember to stretch then

Answer 7

practice the van dam splits